


Be Still

by kaeorin



Series: Loki's Lullabies [93]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety, Avenger Loki (Marvel), Caretaking, Dermatillomania, Embarrassment, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Protective Loki (Marvel), Reader-Insert, Self-Hatred, Skin-picking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:08:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24937345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin
Summary: You have a bad habit of picking at your nails when you’re nervous, and Loki does what he can to keep you from hurting yourself. (Be aware/TW skin-picking, dermatillomania.)
Relationships: Loki (Marvel)/Reader
Series: Loki's Lullabies [93]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240
Comments: 15
Kudos: 165





	Be Still

**Author's Note:**

> A reader on Tumblr requested something wherein the reader has some kind of nervous habit and Loki tries to help. So I decided to jam my very own nervous habit (honestly it's more of a compulsion really, not necessarily associated with anxiety) into our dear reader. **This focuses pretty heavily on skin-picking/dermatillomania** so please please _please_ don't read this one if that might trigger you to hurt yourself. If you super-need a Lullaby tonight but this one isn't going to work for you, maybe check out one of the earlier ones you haven't read in a while? I know there's a link somewhere up there in the header but also here's another one because I REALLY don't want you to read this one if it's going to hurt you: [Loki's Lullabies](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240)

It was one of your worst habits, and it had been for as long as you could remember. You picked. When you were stressed or anxious, or nervous, or uncertain, or uneasy, you would dig at the skin around your nailbeds and pull it apart. There was always something there that demanded to be tugged, some little shred of skin that refused to lie flat against the rest of you. You’d tried everything. Every moisturizing lotion and cream on the market. Manicures expensive enough to make you not want to ruin them by picking. Sometimes, on your worst nights, you even tried putting gloves on so you couldn’t get at the skin. But when you were in just the right—or wrong—mindset, it became so much easier to focus on the desire to make your skin lie flat than whatever else was going on around you. 

Sometimes you picked until your skin was raw. Sometimes it bled. When that happened, you couldn’t help but look at your destroyed hands with shame—what kind of grown-ass adult did something like to themselves just because their brain wouldn’t be still? You tried to tell yourself that people didn’t notice, or didn’t care, but when you looked at your hands, all you saw was open wounds. Defects. Stupid.

Loki made you feel even worse. Loki, who looked at you now with open adoration in his eyes, who held your hand sometimes like he was afraid to let you go. He kissed you so sweetly, reverently, and let his mouth trail along your skin just to taste you. He made you feel like something holy. Something to be worshiped. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he liked to bring your hands up to his lips and kiss the tips of each of your fingers.

You always had to look away when he did. There was something vulgar about your shredded skin being so close to his perfect lips. He never let you pull your hand away, so most of the time you had to close your eyes and pretend that you were someone else. Someone normal. Someone without this bizarre urge to absolutely pull themselves apart.

He’d asked you once, early on, what was happening to make your hands look like that. The logical side of your brain told you that he was only asking because maybe he thought someone was hurting you. The rest of your brain wanted to shut off and run away. But you’d rolled your eyes and explained to him that you did it to yourself. You tried to play it off as something absolutely stupid, ridiculous, but he must have heard something more serious beneath your voice, because he’d only looked at you, wide-eyed and silent.

Sometimes that look was enough to get you to stop. If things weren’t truly awful, that first twinge of pain from pulling too hard would conjure up your memory of his face, and you could force yourself to do something else instead. You’d always kept lotion close at hand, less for the moisture it offered and more for...just the slimy texture. The feeling of it kept you from picking. If you weren’t too far gone, you could apply it generously to your hands and force yourself to sit quietly and without moving until it had soaked into your skin. 

You didn’t know exactly what you’d expected when Loki showed up in your apartment to lock down with you, but you certainly hadn’t thought about just how much of you he’d be seeing. It was embarrassing, how many times he would come up behind you while you stared blankly at your work on the computer screen, and he’d have to reach down to take your hand in his. The first few times he did, he’d nodded towards your other hand and you knew. You were picking again. You wanted his presence to be enough to make you stop entirely. It wouldn’t fix anything about your mental state, obviously, but it was not his job to keep you from hurting yourself. But all that really happened was you started doing it in private. If you couldn’t sleep, you’d lie there and let yourself get lost in your whirling thoughts, and he’d kiss you so sweetly—and sadly—in the morning.

Things would be different if the world was different. If the city—the entire world—was not suddenly blanketed with this looming threat that caused everything to shut down, maybe you’d be better suited to handle the basic, background level of uncertainty in your mind. But it was like people were finally realizing what a shitshow everything was, and though revolution was great and badly, badly needed, it pretty much did away with any last shreds of certainty that you’d ever had. 

Loki did what he could—or what you let him do. He knelt at your feet and carefully painted your nails. That honestly worked longer than the salon-manicures ever had, but it didn’t work forever. He held your hand far more often than he should have had to, and not simply because he wanted to: it was because he was trying to save you. You could make yourself sit there with him for a long time, but inevitably your mind would wander and that urge to pick would come back. 

Tonight he’d interrupted you in the middle of things. He tried to take your hand, but you pulled away after only a moment. The skin was uneven. You would stop as soon as you’d pulled off that one last bit, but until you did, it would haunt you. 

“Stop it,” he finally ordered, closing his fingers around both of your wrists like shackles. “What are you doing?”

It was so rare for him to look at you like that, with that sharpness that made you want to shrink down until you were utterly invisible, but you couldn’t bring yourself to look away. “It’s like I _have_ to.” Asgardian brains probably didn’t work like human brains, did they? It was hard to imagine him ever feeling so stuck on such a stupid little thing. You twisted your wrist around until you could rub the side of your finger over his skin. Surely he could feel the part that was driving you crazy, right? “That. I want that gone.” You closed your eyes.

He let out a long breath and loosened his grip. But he didn’t release you completely. Instead, he tucked your hands under each of your legs and then let his hands rest there for just a moment. “Be still,” he ordered. The ghost of a smile quirked your lips. You were familiar with that voice. By now it was sort of a part of you, obeying that voice. “I’m going to help you, but you’ll have to sit perfectly still for a minute. Can you do that?”

You nodded, but kept your eyes closed. He stood up and leaned down just long enough to kiss your forehead. You heard him walk into your bathroom and then open your medicine cabinet. You listened to him rummage around in there, and he must have found what he was looking for, because right away his footsteps brought him back to you. He took your hand—the offending hand, the ragged one—in his. You opened your eyes, only to see him studying your finger very carefully while aligning your nail clippers to snip off the dry skin. You tried to pull away. This was _stupid_. He was actual royalty; he didn’t need to be the one to do something so gross. But he kept a tight grip on you, and his brow furrowed as he shot you a questioning look.

“I can do that,” you said. “I’m sorry. I should have thought of that myself. You shouldn’t have to do that.”

He shook his head slowly at you, and didn’t let you go. “Let me. Darling, you do so much for me. Allow me to look after you. Please.”

Your pride (or lack thereof) told you to insist on pulling away. What would the people of Asgard say if they could see their prince right now? Kneeling before a _mortal_ , and not even for the first time, trying to keep them from pulling themselves apart. 

But the softness in his face made you fall still. 

Who cared what the Asgardians would think? They’d clearly never thought of him very kindly to begin with. You didn’t do all that much for him, just afforded him the basic care and affection that every living creature deserved. And maybe you kissed him and touched him more often than that, but why wouldn’t you? Why hadn’t they? He’d come to Earth broken and neglected in a way that had only a little to do with the torture he’d undergone. It went deeper than that. It made your heart constrict painfully in your chest and made you want to wrap him in your arms and keep him as safe as someone like you could. Perhaps it was silly of him to feel like he needed to repay your love and basic human kindness, but wasn’t allowing him to do that better than making him feel bad for wanting it?

You nodded a little. It might have been imperceptible, if Loki wasn’t the one looking at you. He brought your hand to his lips and kissed your knuckles, and then carefully cut away all the offending tatters of skin that might have drawn your attention after you’d finished with that first one. He kissed each of your fingertips. The love in his touch was undeniable. It made your eyes sting—tears of shame, but also tears of wonder. When he was finished with the first hand, he took your other one and repeated the process. He didn’t cause even a moment of pain, but when he was finished, there was nothing left to pick at. You curled your fingers into your palms, partly to hide them from view but also partly to treasure the feeling of his kisses, and forced yourself to look at him.

He did not seem surprised or put-off by the tears in your eyes. Maybe he understood. He just smiled at you and then moved forward to capture your lips with his own as though he hadn’t just had to treat you like a child. 

“It’s alright,” he mumbled, and his lips brushed against yours. “Darling. You’re alright.”

And later that night, when you curled into him on the sofa and the two of you settled on a movie to watch, he took your hand because he _wanted_ to.


End file.
